Orlando Explores Changing Gender and Time

Classic Stage Company's production of Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf's novel, is conventional Sarah Ruhl adaptation. By conventional Sarah Ruhl, I mean entirely unconventional storytelling. Eschewing traditional limits of time and gender, Orlando tells the story of a Seventeenth Century English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one day to find that he's actually a woman. After the transformation, every now and then Orlando also finds herself in a different century. Trying to convey the idea that human identity shouldn't be restricted to the period or gender that we're born into, Woolf's novel was an homage to her progressive friend, Vita Sackville-West.

Ruhl faithfully brings Woolf's post-modernist concepts to the stage. Supporting Orlando (Francesca Faridany), Ruhl has created three male ensemble characters who take on different roles. The actor with the most speaking parts, David Greenspan, plays a Queen who favors Orlando in the Seventeenth Century. He then morphs into a man playing a woman to woo the female Orlando in the second half. All three Ensemble members and Orlando narrate their actions as they perform them to advance the plot. For example, Orlando describes how he ice skates with his love interest, Sasha (Annika Boras), as they mime ice skating.

The first half of the play takes place in the early Seventeenth Century, letting the audience get well acquainted with Orlando before the gender/time-bending shenanigans begin. Orlando lays on the grass in the opening scene, trying to compose a poem. His rhyming "green" with "green" shows us that he still needs to get in touch with his inner artist. This quest to find himself essentially guides the rest of the play.

A story that's so much about the inner life of its eponymous character needs a strong actor. Francesca Faridany fulfills the role well. Known for playing gender-bending parts--I last saw her as Rosalind in All's Well That Ends Well--Faridany gracefully transitions from male to female here while retaining one personality. She convincingly plays a former man puzzled by the new constraints on his life. At one point, Orlando describes her newfound role of pouring tea and asking men how they would like it. While she doesn't seem to mind her new role, it makes us wonder how much of the gender roles that we adopt is actually acting. The one drawback of casting Faridany is that she reminds us a lot of Tilda Swinton in the film Orlando. They both have red hair and channel a certain androgyny. Happily, Faridany brings a more playful demeanor to Orlando than Swinton.

While leaving some loose ends open, Orlando is not really about plot, but about mood. Ruhl covers four centuries skillfully, retaining Orlando's consistent character throughout. The audience is left with a warm fuzzy feeling despite its liberal use of metaphysical hijinks.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: An Emo Musical

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (or BBAJ as fans are already dubbing it) is a musical that could have been written by emo comparative literature and history graduate students. History dominates the musical's content while comp lit guides its structure. On the history side, BBAJ is ostensibly about the rise of Andrew Jackson (Benjamin Walker), the seventh president of the United States. It includes some accurate, yet little known facts. Did you know Jackson's wife was technically still married when the two of them got married? The characterization of John Calhoun (Darren Goldstein), Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay are more amusing for those who remember them via AP US History. Van Buren and Clay are Yankee fops while Calhoun just cares about owning slaves. Most of the narrative history is presented by the storyteller (Kristine Nielsen), who appears to be a contemporary history teacher.

On the comparative literature side, BBAJ is one long, self-aware metaphor. It's super meta in that's it's cognizant of being a story about the Nineteenth Century told during the Twenty-First. Walker as Jackson talks directly to the narrator. Songs make references to Twentieth Century thinkers Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag. The lyrics helpfully tell us "she hadn't been born yet." On top of this, the production also parodies the emo sensibility. Whenever Jackson loses an election, or something doesn't go his way, he crosses his tight-legged jeans, tucks himself into his jacket and sulks in the corner. He and his wife Rachel initially bond over a bout of blood-letting. At one point, after Jackson's first failed presidential run, Cher's "Song for the Lonely" comes over the speaker system. A disco ball is busted out while Walker mimes slitting his wrists for several minutes.

Subtlety is not the goal here. Through such ribald storytelling, we are hit over the head with the comparisons between Jackson's presidential and current events. "Populism, Yeah Yeah," the opening number, draws parallels to the Tea Party. Jacksonites complain that Washington DC only represents Northeastern elitists while leaving frontiersmen like Jackson to fend against the Indians by themselves. Later, Jackson loses the election through the "Corrupt Bargain," which gave John Quincey Adams--"I should be president because my father was"--the presidency for promising Henry Clay Secretary of State. When Jackson emerges from political exile, going on to win the election of 1828, he finds that populism may not be the best strategy. After all, people voted for him so that he could make decisions for them. The question over the merits of direct democracy Jackson's final conflict.

Unfortunately, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson loses momentum in its final moments. It simply suggests to the audience that there are downsides to populism without exploring it further. Jackson also commits his most treacherous actions towards Native Americans towards the end with a bit of forced self-reflection.

Now playing at the Bernard Jacobs theatre after premiering Off-Broadway last year, BBAJ draws crowds of young hipsters dressed up for a rock concert. Much of the musical does sound like a rock show. As opposed to other contemporary "rock operas" like Next to Normal, the music here is not continuous. Indeed, the soundtrack is only a little more than 30 minutes. Instead of telling the story, the songs here seem to serve as interludes that are an excuse to blare loud music and turn on low-level, colored house lights. While lacking depth, this style is highly entertaining.

Benjamin Walker's commanding presence as Andrew Jackson is the best part of the BBAJ. He hams up the emo parts unselfconsciously. Though he doesn't have a great singing voice, he does have a powerful one. His speeches and jokes truly endear Jackson to the audience. But at the end, we are still left to decide Jackson's legacy as either one of the greatest presidents of all time, or a murderer.

Time Stands Still is Far from Static

Two restless souls--he a foreign correspondent, she a photojournalist--come back to their Brooklyn apartment after she gets hurt on the job in Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still. After a successful Broadway run through Manhattan Theater Company in the 2008-2009 season, it is now back after a summer hiatus. Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) has just woken from a coma after a roadside bomb flung her from her car, simultaneously killing her translator, Tariq. Wearing a leg brace and facial scabs, she limps around the apartment while her partner Jamie attends to her. But Sarah is also quick to shrug off special treatment, allowing her editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), and his new girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci). When they ask about the explosion, Sarah replies, "Occupational hazard," in a typically practical manner.

After the first two scenes, we may feel that we have all four of these characters figured out. Sarah is a cerebral world-saving workaholic; Jamie is her perfect counterpart as a romantic journalist; Richard is suffering from a midlife crisis, which involves getting together with Mandy, an unintellectual event planner.

Slowly, through incremental, well-paced steps, Donald Margulies reveals the back story behind Sarah's stoicism and Jamie's obsequiousness. Margulies peels back the layers of their personalities to reveal that things aren't as simple as they first appear. Margulies has mastered the art of exposition through convincing dialogue. It's not surprising that Time Stands Still earned him a Tony nomination for best play last year. Just like how a real couple might not dive into everything that they did while apart for work, it takes Sarah and Jamie some time to warm up to each other here.

When they do, things they want to say to each other seem to explode out of their mouths. Jamie proposes they get married after eight years of living together. He claims it's a good idea for hospital visitation rights while giving off the hint there's something lingering beneath the surface. Perhaps it's Sarah's affair with her translator, Tariq, which she reveals in the next line. Perhaps it's Jamie's own breakdown after seeing children explode in front of him, causing him to leave Sarah with Tariq in the first place. Is Jamie trying to redeem himself? Is he just insecure? And where does Sarah's hesitancy come from?

Margulies provides the answers to these questions in the second act without hitting the audience over the head with the characters' motivations. There are no sudden epiphanies or revelations. Rather, the characters figure themselves out at the same time as the audience. Sarah and Jamie realize that their real problem may be that they simply want different things. Jamie, to settle down, but Sarah to keep traveling. At the same time, Sarah's starting to question her own motives for her profession.

In one of the most moving monologues in the play, Sarah tells Jamie how she kept shooting film despite a woman's protests after an explosion in Mosul. "What I did was so wrong it was indecent...They didn't want me taking pictures. That was a sacred place to them...I live off the suffering of strangers." Meanwhile, Mandy is the perfect counterpoint to Sarah's worldviews. Looking at Sarah's pictures, Mandy starts to get upset. "Why didn't you help them?" she wants to know. Indeed, why don't we help the millions of poor people in the world, is one of the questions Time Stands Still asks us to consider. But the more important one is how does our answer to that question effect our relationships?

Belle and Sebastian in Brooklyn

The rain held off for Belle and Sebastian's first stop in the US Thursday night in Brooklyn. Taking place at the Williamsburg Waterfront in a paved lot that overlooks the East River, the show was surprisingly packed for such dreary conditions in an outside venue. Indeed, earlier, people had been selling tickets for the show at half price on Craigslist. But there a couple thousand of us were, ready to hear Belle and Sebastian at their first live North American performance in four years. What was not surprising was that the show was packed with older people--by which I mean not in their twenties. This wasn't too surprising because Belle and Sebastian has been around since the 1990s.

These older concertgoers had a good time rocking to Teenage Fanclub, the opening act. Sounding like a classic rock band straight from the Seventies, the Scottish band crooned out conventional, yet pretty sounding love songs. "I don't need much when I still have thee," to a warming effect as the winds howled behind them.

Soon, Belle and Sebastian took the stage to raucous cheers. Unfortunately, the audience was kind of subdued by the song, "I Didn't See it Coming," from their new album "Belle and Sebastian Write About Love," which doesn't come out for another week in the States. (Due to some unfortunate paving, the floor space of the Williamsburg Waterfront is kind of slanted away from the stage, rendering it a challenge for me to see throughout the show. But this is no reflection on Belle and Sebastian). Luckily, the band made it up to us by following the new song with the more familiar "I'm a Cuckoo." We were relieved to discover that the rest of the set consisted mostly of songs from "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" and "If You're Feeling Sinister," their two most popular albums. They also threw in "The Boy with the Arab Strap," honoring a request, as well as a b-side from "Push Barman to Open New Wounds." Belle and Sebastian's live versions of many of their songs also added a bit extra. "Lord Anthony" departed the most from its album version as Murdoch slowed down the pauses in the song even more to build tension. The contrast between the acoustic beginning and the drum-infused ending truly revealed the energy of the song. The sound mix overall was perfection, allowing us to hear Stuart Murdoch sing his own lyrics even through the heavy winds.

Although they played eighteen songs total, the concert lasted nearly two hours because Belle and Sebastian expertly filled some time with well-chosen dialoguing. At one point, the guitarist Stevie Jackson, took the time to teach us some vocals of "I'm Not Living in the Real World." Later, the band took a break to throw toy footballs to children who were dragged to the concert by their parents.

Finally, Belle and Sebastian closed with a short encore consisting of two songs from "If You're Feeling Sinister." While the concert provided a good sampling of songs from the new album, it was more successful at invoking the first time you discovered Belle and Sebastian and fell in love with them.

Many Laughs but Few Thoughts from La Bete

David Hirson's La Bete got off to an inauspicious start when it first premiered on Broadway in 1991. After a few previews, it only made it two twenty-five performances. Perhaps this was because it's entirely in iambic pentameter and set in Seventeenth Century France. But now, it's going for its second Broadway run after a successful West End revival. Its run was so successful that the producers brought it straight to Broadway this fall without a break. La Bete made it to everyone's most anticipated fall theatre list from New York Magazine to Vogue.

Sitting in the last balcony row of the packed Music Box Theatre during a recent weekday performance, the laughter all around me affirmed the show's newfound popularity. People seemed to love the nearly forty minutes worth of jokes and play on words that opened this two hour production. Indeed, there is something delightful about the cognitive dissonance of hearing contemporary, dirty jokes in a play told in rhyming iambic pentameter set three hundred and fifty years earlier in France. Maybe it's because it makes us modern audiences feel smarter. Also making us feel smart is the whole irony of a play about plays.

The farcical gist of La Bete is that the esteemed playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce) gets a new player, Valere (Mark Rylance), foisted on him by his patron, the Princess (Joanna Lumley). Elomire is a man of ideas who writes "serious" plays. He has no tolerance of vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Just look at him working when the play opens. Surrounded by a huge library of books, we see him scratching away with his quill in a somber corner desk. His solitude is quickly ruined by Valere, the Princess's recommendation who looks like he has been sleeping on the street. Valere quickly launches into a monologue about his thoughts on art as he tries to persuade Elomire that he's the perfect addition to his acting troupe.

Mark Rylance's Valere is the main reason to see La Bete. His 25 minute opening diabtribe comes off as what a naturally self-absorbed person would say. Without skipping a beat, he goes from asking Elomire if he's talked too much about himself right back to talking about himself. If ADD had been diagnosable in the Seventeenth Century, Valere would have had it. Valere flits from Cicero to The Bible as topics of conversation. Rylance uses his body--in addition to words--to produce a comic effect. Before Valere's arrival, Elomire warns that Valere spits as he speaks. Sure enough, Rylance arrives eating and spitting simultaneously. After all this food, Valere develops some gas. He finally relieves himself in Elomire's bathroom, straining and talking through a half-open door.

However, once Rylance's performance is over, things get serious. The Princess shows up to order Elomire to accept Valere. Except, you see, Elomire, the Princess, and Valere all have different ideas of what "art" ought to be. Hirson gives the Princess and Elomire lengthy speeches where they spell out their different beliefs. Though delivered in iambic pentameter, this part is quite unsubtle and boring. Elomire and the Princess state the positions that you'd expect from a wealthy 17th Century patron and a well-known 17th Century playwright.

Less boring--but still cliched--Hirson allows Valere to perform a play within a play that spells out his beliefs about the state of art in 17th Century France. Again, no surprise here. His play seems to criticize the formal artistic establishment. Finally, only in the last ten minutes of the play does Hirson introduce a key point of tension: Will the troupe's players go with Valere or with Elomire? Though the troupes make a pretty clear decision, the audience is left with an unclear message. Hirson does not spend enough time explaining either actors' opinions or art or where these opinions come from. This leads to an abrupt, and somewhat unsastisfying ending. Luckily, we are consoled by the remembrance of the first half of the play and its clever laughs.